With the increasing importance of LED-based lighting, LEDs already have a significant role in the area of decorative lighting. The low power consumption and long lifetime of LEDs make them a highly favorable choice for various applications. Moreover, LEDs having various colors are known in the art. It is also known, for instance, to combine red, green and blue LEDs to create the impression of a virtually unlimited variety of colors.
Especially when controlling numerous LEDs to create certain distributed effects, like LEDs on a string of lights or on a lighting surface, the cost of control electronics has to be taken into account. While relatively cheap LEDs are available today, a need exists to control the LED arrangement by means of simple and cheap control elements.
For decorative and/or user interactive LEDs and other kinds of loads, it is often desirable to detect the place where a certain effect is desired. For instance, in a string of
LEDs, one can think of a user indicating one or several LEDs to be activated, which indication is detected by some kind of sensor. After said detection, a driver or the like has to deliver the energy to this specific location. For many applications, resolution and accuracy requirements put on the detection are quite high, in order to avoid a mismatch between desired and realized effect.
For optical effects like the ones created with LEDs, the control may be based on cameras and a dedicated picture processing algorithm. In this case, good alignment can be expected. For other, non-optical effects, the determination of the actual effect position is quite complicated, so that there is hardly any possibility of applying a feedback signal to the controller. In addition to these control problems, the driver has to offer a high resolution in order to reproduce most of the desired effects at the specific location.
However, the detection and control devices known in the art are quite complicated, especially when a large area and/or many devices have to be controlled. This in turn leads to relatively high costs.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide cost-efficient and accurate means for user interactive powering of loads.